Chatham, Ontario

What We Believe

We call ourselves the Christian Reformed Church in North America.What does that mean?

We call ourselves Christian because we are followers of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus was the Son of God and that he is the center of human history.

We’re called Reformed because we grow on a branch of the church tree that emerged from the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe.

We’re a Church because we believe God has called us together to be a people who belong to him and live for him.

North America tells you where we are situated; but it also tells you we’re connected with other Reformed denominations in other places around the globe.

What unites these diverse people across North America? What binds them into one entity?

Among other things, we agree on certain core beliefs. That is one of the reasons we gather to worship and to work, pursuing God’s plan for this world. We believe in the Bible as the authoritative Word of God. And we speak with a Reformed accent.

What We Believe

Biblical Standard

We believe that the bible is the authoritative Word of God. It contains all that people in any age need to know for their salvation. We call the Bible God’s Word, believing that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God speaks to us through this book.

The Bible has two major sections that at first glance seem quite different from each other. The Old Testament records God’s work through centuries of Israelite history until about 400 B.C. The New Testament picks up with God’s work through the life of Jesus, the coming of the Holy Spirit in power, and the subsequent spread of the church over the first century A.D. You could also think of the Bible as a library of sixty-six unique books of various kinds by many authors in different contexts over thousands of years. But it is only one book: the whole of it forms one richly textured story of God’s loving purpose in relation to humans and the whole creation.

Ecumenical Creeds: Our church subscribes to the following three creeds: